"[... T]he cartoon (the Nazis are cats, the Jews mice), succeeds perfectly in shocking us out of any lingering sense of familiarity with the events described, approaching, as it does, the unspeakable through the diminutive." --Maus, front jacket flap.
Much was made about this quote in class on Monday, and although I agree with the general thrust of the statement, I disagree with the craft critique on how it creates this effect of defamiliarization. (quick note: according to google/firefox, defamiliarization isn't a word. but if demilitarization can be an acceptable term, then I feel comfortable with my neologism here).
My qualm is with the second part of that statement. What is the significance of the "diminutive" in Art Spiegelman's Maus? I'm not sure how much the effect of the diminutive really plays into my response to the novel. I think the surreality of talking animals enacting a holocaust narrative does more to scatter familiarity than the size of the characters. In fact, there's really no evidence that the characters in the novel are meant to be diminutive; they seem to live in normal-sized homes and use objects on a decidedly human scale. We don't see them frolicking amidst oversized lawn detritus a la Rick Moranis in "Honey, I Shrunk the Kids".
Perhaps the diminution is meant to refer to the size of events? But the size of events doesn't seem to me any smaller in Maus than in any other holocaust narrative. The approach of the novel, which addresses a major historic event by focusing on the life of a single individual during that event, is a pretty standard way to gain both intimacy and epic scope in both prose and film, such as Tim O'Brien's The Things They Carried or David Lean's Doctor Zhivago.
I think the universality of narrative that Hayden White discusses in “The Value of Narrativity in the Representation of Reality" trumps the problems of the diminutive in Maus. Although we may be accustomed to mice as these tiny little pests scurrying about our feet in dank and fetid places, we don't respond to those sorts of connotations or impulses much at all in the graphic novel, and if we do, they are tertiary to both the immediacy and familiarity of the war-survivor narrative (comforting fiction though it may be, Mr. White) and the other considerations raised by using animals as characters (such as the predatory dichotomy briefly discussed in class).
What a great book - I had a class that covered it for several weeks.
ReplyDeleteI think diminutive in this sentence means two things...
1.) Compared to the entire holocaust and the countless stories, each character is just a tiny part of a massive, horrific event
2.) That even was so horrific you can't really fahtom it without having been there. But the way the comic approaches it - from animals, and interesting characters, etc - makes it small enough that we can begin to digest it.
I remember talk from somewhere that Nazi propaganda films used to depict Jews in a way that made them look like mice, scurring around and looking shifty. It was an effective way to make Jews seem like unappealing and nasty "rodents.". So using the same device that was meant to degrade when the Nazi's did it, and turning it sympathetic is, I would suggest, bold, and by that perhaps I mean de-diminuitive, and familiar, although I don't think it's fair to the cats.
ReplyDeleteI agree that it is not necessarily diminutive, though what is exactly meant by that is obviously up for debate. I also don't feel that there is "defamiliarization" on any level. Indeed, even given that the characters are anthropomorphized animals, I don't think that diminishes familiarity either. We are inundated with cartoon animals with human characteristics from a young age, so it's really not much of a stretch or shock, though I do agree that Spiegelman successfully sets his tale apart from any other on the subject (much like Tim O'Brien, I'm glad you mentioned that because it is similar in many ways to Maus). While on the subject of humanized animal characters, it would be interesting to see what people think of ascribing different species to different human groups and what can be done with that. The representation of Jews as mice and Nazis as Cats is seemingly simple, but when introducing non-Jewish Poles as pigs and Americans as Dogs, it certainly complicates the anthropomorphism in Maus.
ReplyDeleteThe definition of a narrative as defined by Hayden White is involved in Maus. I address it in my blog as well. The very way that Spiegelman addresses the Holocaust story with different anthropomorphic characters is a distinct narration. Would it have been a more effective story if we had created our own characters without the comics that Spiegelman draws?
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